"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian"
About this Quote
There’s a pop musician’s blunt efficiency here: one sentence, no footnotes, a gut-level thought experiment. You can hear the activist’s wager: if you force a direct encounter with suffering, compassion will outrun appetite. It’s also a savvy media critique. We live in a culture where everything is filmed except the parts that might disrupt consumption. The quote uses voyeurism as ethics: if you can’t watch it, why can you endorse it?
Subtextually, McCartney is repositioning vegetarianism from lifestyle to accountability. The “everyone” is deliberately sweeping - less a factual claim than a moral dare, a way of framing meat-eating as something that needs shadows to survive. Coming from a Beatle-turned-advocate, it taps celebrity’s real leverage: not expertise, but attention. He’s trying to move the debate from taste to witness, from argument to recoil.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Paul McCartney — "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." (commonly attributed). See Wikiquote: Paul McCartney. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
McCartney, Paul. (2026, January 15). If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-slaughterhouses-had-glass-walls-everyone-would-28519/
Chicago Style
McCartney, Paul. "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-slaughterhouses-had-glass-walls-everyone-would-28519/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-slaughterhouses-had-glass-walls-everyone-would-28519/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.








